Underworld

It has been a while since I last sampled something out of the ranks associated with Underground Symphony, but they’ve usually tended to be hit or miss, but their hits and misses tend to be geared somewhere towards the middle of the road. There is nothing that can defined as either mind blowing or ear paining coming out of their neck of the woods, and this pretty well defines one of their latest acts to churn out a debut LP. As best as can be assessed, Great Master is a typical representative of melodic, keyboard happy, European power metal, but presented in somewhat of an unconventional manner that is fairly refreshing.

Perhaps the biggest draw put forth by “Underworld” as an album is that in spite of being heavily oriented towards the old style Helloween and 90s Nocturnal Rites model, the production practices and bare bones simplicity suggests a good helping of something much older. When taken entirely based on the melodic content and the harmonic progression of triumphant sounding speed metal anthems in “Eagle Of 20th” and “The Battle Of Lost Heroes”, this screams a classic German speed approach in line with “Walls Of Jericho” and “Into The Dark Past”. But often times the really primitive production almost wants to hint at a early 80s metal sound, perhaps most resembling early 80s Riot. Had this been released in 1986, it would have been hailed as the worthy successor of the Helloween EP, but today it definitely screams retro.

At first this was a little bit hard to get into, but after reviewing NR’s “In A Time Of Blood And Fire”, I began to remember the resurgence of power metal that was ushered in during the mid 90s, and how it began by revisiting the past. This was then picked up by Hammerfall, Sacred Steel and Iron Fire (among others) and thus was born the amazing resurgence that shook me out of my obsession with grunge music and led me to where I am today. This album doesn’t go quite as far as those albums do in the territory explored, and largely falls back on a very primitive riff set that gets a little redundant at times. Sometimes things get overtly Iron Maiden-like in “King Of The Night”, at others it goes into classic Helloween mode ala “The Lost Secret…Underworld”, but largely the songs are very predictable and not too adventurous.

While basically an album that is content to stay in the realms of late 80s power metal classicism, “Underworld” is a fun album that reminds of the days before bands in this genre started putting more emphasis on guitar solos and all speed, all the time. The vocalist and the presentation are a bit too soft and mellow for a full comparison to Running Wild and Grave Digger, but most who go for that mode of simplistic, old school metal with an emphasis on speed will be the principle target audience of this. The band’s relatively tame and predictable rendition of “Pachelbel’s Canon” at the end pretty well underscores that they are in this business more to reassert than to explore, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.

Originally submitted to (www.metal-observer.com) on January 31, 2011.